Beyond Asset Tracking: The Strategic Value of Real-Time Location Services (RTLS)
Every hospital leader has heard the complaints: clinical staff spending precious minutes tracking down equipment, delays in patient care while nurses search for IV pumps, frustrated biomedical teams unable to locate assets for scheduled maintenance… The most common response to these challenges? Invest in Real-Time Location Services (RTLS) to help staff find equipment faster.
RTLS technology uses sensors, badges, and user interfaces to pinpoint the location of equipment, staff, and patients in real time. Although RTLS has become synonymous with “finding stuff,” that’s only scratching the surface of what this technology can do.
The truth is, RTLS isn’t just about tracking things. It’s the infrastructure that enables multiple connected applications to work together simultaneously—from hand hygiene monitoring and asset tracking to contact tracing—all within one integrated ecosystem. When healthcare organizations think of RTLS only as a glorified equipment finder, they miss the opportunity to fundamentally improve how they deliver care, support their staff, and operate more efficiently.
What is RTLS?
Real-Time Location Services use various wireless technologies, including RFID, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, to automatically identify and track the location of objects or people within a defined space. In healthcare settings, this typically involves:
- Location hubs installed throughout the facility
- Tags or badges attached to equipment, worn by staff, or placed on assets
- A software platform that processes location data and makes it actionable
While the technology itself is relatively straightforward, the applications are remarkably diverse. Let’s explore how RTLS creates value far beyond equipment tracking.
The Hidden Applications of RTLS
RTLS has evolved into an essential component of modern hospital operations. As healthcare organizations face mounting pressure to improve patient outcomes while controlling costs, RTLS quietly powers some of the most impactful improvements in patient safety, staff efficiency, and financial performance that hospitals are achieving today.
1. Patient Experience & Safety
When we think about patient safety and experience, we often focus on clinical interventions such as medications, procedures, and protocols. But some of the most impactful improvements come from ensuring patients receive timely, consistent attention throughout their stay.
Faster Response Times
RTLS dramatically reduces patient wait times by eliminating one of the most common bottlenecks: finding the right equipment. When clinical staff can instantly locate an IV pump, wheelchair, or vital signs monitor instead of searching multiple rooms and supply closets, they can respond to patient needs minutes faster. Research shows that frontline staff can save up to 30 minutes daily by eliminating equipment search time—time that can be redirected to direct patient care. This improved responsiveness directly impacts HCAHPS performance, particularly in the “Responsiveness of Hospital Staff” domain where patients evaluate how quickly their needs are addressed.
Proactive Rounding That Prevents Serious Events
RTLS transforms rounding compliance from good intentions into measurable outcomes by automatically tracking which patient rooms have been visited and when. Interactive displays show at a glance which patients are overdue for a visit, allowing charge nurses and unit managers to proactively redirect staff before gaps in care occur. The result is fewer falls, fewer pressure injuries, and increased patient satisfaction—all without adding manual documentation burden to already stretched clinical staff.
2. Staff Efficiency & Workflow
Healthcare workers are stretched thin. Between documentation requirements, care coordination, and countless interruptions, the time available for direct patient care continues to shrink. RTLS can eliminate some of the most frustrating time-wasters.
Rounding Visibility
RTLS provides real-time visibility into which patients need attention. When staff badges interact with patient room sensors, the system captures rounding activity and displays which rooms have gone longest without a visit. This allows nurses to quickly identify gaps and act, prioritizing patients who need attention most. With integration into EHR systems, rounding activity can be automatically documented, eliminating manual data entry while providing objective data for process improvement.
Contact Tracing
RTLS-enabled contact tracing automatically captures all badged employee-to-patient and badged employee-to-badged employee contacts in real time. When an infectious disease exposure is identified, infection control and occupational health staff can generate a comprehensive list of potentially exposed individuals and equipment with the click of a button. This replaces time-intensive manual methods that rely on staff memory, providing more complete and accurate contact information while allowing hospitals to respond immediately without pulling clinicians away from patient care.
3. Operational & Financial Impact
Healthcare organizations are operating on increasingly thin margins. Every dollar spent on unnecessary equipment purchases, every hour wasted searching for missing assets, and every instance of theft or loss directly impacts the bottom line. RTLS addresses these challenges with data-driven insights.
Utilization Insights
RTLS utilization data prevents unnecessary capital expenditures by revealing the truth about equipment availability. In one real example, when management received a request for additional IV pumps at $2,500 per unit, reviewing utilization data first revealed the facility already had sufficient pumps—they just weren’t distributed effectively. This data-driven approach prevented tens of thousands in unnecessary equipment purchases. Organizations can examine utilization patterns and optimize distribution of existing assets before defaulting to new purchases.
Equipment Maintenance and Recall Compliance
RTLS ensures biomedical engineering teams always know where every piece of equipment is located, enabling 100% preventive maintenance compliance without the guesswork of tracking down assets. This same visibility also helps with recall management—when a medical device manufacturer issues a safety recall, healthcare organizations can instantly identify the exact location of every device matching recall criteria, verify that each one has been properly addressed, and document complete compliance. Without RTLS, both processes depend on manual inventory checks, physical searches, and incomplete asset management data. RTLS provides the certainty that manual methods can’t match, reducing both patient safety risk and regulatory exposure.
Reducing Theft and Loss
Lost and stolen equipment costs the healthcare industry millions annually. For example, one medical center reported nearly 400 missing items over a four-year period, representing more than $11 million in losses. RTLS reduces these losses by deterring theft through tracking awareness, enabling quick recovery through last-known-location data, and identifying unusual movement patterns. Organizations implementing RTLS asset tracking consistently report significant reductions in equipment losses, often recovering their technology investment within the first year.
RTLS as Healthcare Infrastructure
The most forward-thinking healthcare organizations have stopped thinking about RTLS as a single-purpose tool for finding equipment. Instead, they recognize it as foundational infrastructure that enables multiple connected applications to work together, creating a comprehensive ecosystem for improving patient outcomes, supporting clinical staff, and operating more efficiently.
When the same sensor network that tracks equipment location also monitors hand hygiene compliance, captures rounding activity, enables contact tracing, and provides utilization analytics, the value proposition becomes exponentially greater.
So yes, RTLS can help you find that bladder scanner. But if that’s all you’re using it for, you’re missing the bigger opportunity.